There's a country that will pay $300,000 per rhino horn to cure cancer and hangovers, and it's wiping out rhinos

It was in most respects a typical heist that happened in Dublin last month. Masked men, roughed-up security guards, $650,000 in stolen booty. But this wasn't art or jewelry that was stolen. The contraband, instead, was four rhinoceros heads. Or, more specifically, their horns.

If you guessed "China," you were wrong. The answer is Vietnam. The country's appetite for rhino horn is so great that it now fetches up to $100,000/kg, making it worth more than its weight in gold. (Horns average around 1-3 kg each, depending on the species.)

Behind the mysterious craze for rhino horn

The weird thing is that the surge in Vietnamese demand is fairly recent. Though rhino horn elixirs for fevers and liver problems were first prescribed in traditional Chinese medicine more than 1,800 years ago, by the early 1990s demand was limited. Trade bans among Asian countries instituted in the 1980s and early 1990s proved largely effective in quashing supply, with some help from poaching crackdowns in countries where rhinos live. Meanwhile, the removal of rhino horn powder from traditional Chinese pharmacopeia in the 1990s had largely doused demand. In the early 1990s, for instance, horns sold for only $250-500/kg (pdf, p.85). And only around 15 rhinos were poached in South Africa each year from 1990 to 2007.

But things started changing in 2008. That year, 83 were killed, followed by 122 the next year. By 2012, that number had hit 688. Here's a look at how many rhinos were killed, on average, each day:

What happened in 2008 to prompt a resurgence in demand? The closest guess is a rumor that swept Vietnam in the mid-2000s that imbibing rhino horn powder had cured a Vietnamese politician's cancer. That rumor persists to this day. And note that this has nothing to do with traditional Chinese medicine. As Huijun Shen, the president of the UK Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine explained to Nature magazine, there's no record of using rhino horn to treat cancer in nearly two millennia worth of Chinese medical texts (p.23).

Plus, rates of cancer are also rising 20-30% a year, both because prosperity has brought increased pollution and unhealthier lifestyles, and simply because more cases are being caught and diagnosed. However, many people still aren't very familiar with cancer, so that 70-80% of patients at Vietnam's four cancer hospitals are diagnosed only in late stages. That gives Vietnam a cancer mortality rate of 73%, one of the highest in the world, according to the deputy director of a hospital in Hanoi; the average for the developing world is 67.8%, he said.

Rhino horn is also popular among some public officials. "I can drink a lot of alcohol but I am still sober and strong. I don't have a headache and I do not feel tired," Tran Huy Tu, a senior policeman, told AFP, apparently fearless of any consequences. "It's not legal to buy this stuff, but in Vietnam you can buy anything with money."

Paradoxically, the world's dwindling rhino population threatens only to make this worse, as diminished supply makes prices climb even higher. Given that one of the things driving demand is the perceived luxury of the item, higher prices alone are unlikely to snuff out demand. And with a single horn fetching as much as $300,000, the risk of being caught probably seems to many poachers to be one worth running.

Vietnam's own nature park rangers don't have to worry, though. Their job is already done. In 2010, the last Javan rhino in Vietnam was found dead, a bullet wound in his leg and with his horn hacked off.